Tales from Arab Detroit (1995)

Tales From Arab Detroit is an intimate community portrait of American-born children of Arab immigrant parents and the ways that traditions migrate and transform. Performances by an Egyptian storyteller provoke a discussion on cultural change within the Detroit Arab community. Through music, poetry and the ironies of everyday life, young people narrate and navigate their parents expectations, and the impact of racial discrimination just a few years before 9/ll. "An absolutely splendid film, a sensitive, elegantly edited gem… we laughed and cried simultaneously." - Naomi Shihab Nye

About the Filmmaker

Joan Mandell is a journalist, oral historian and documentary filmmaker. She currently divides her time between Washington, DC, where she teaches at Georgetown’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, and Detroit, where she is a beekeeper, and worked for many years with the Arab American National Museum. She has also taught at the University of California-Irvine, College for Creative Studies (Detroit) and Birzeit University (Palestine). She served for two decades on the editorial board of MERIP Middle East Report, and was a founding editor of the Jerusalem-based Al-Fajr English language newsweekly. She is co-director of "Gaza Ghetto: Portrait of a Palestinian Family", considered the first feature documentary produced in Gaza.